


Spine and Leaves

by willowbilly



Category: Black Sails
Genre: ...Coping, Alfred Hamilton DIES, Angst, Blood and Gore, But mostly angst, Canon Compliant, Caring Captain Flint, Class Issues, Domestic Fluff, Drinking, Ear Piercings, F/M, Femdom, Flint is essentially one of those cats who bring back dead mice to leave on the doorstep as presents, Grief/Mourning, Haircuts, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Minor Character Death, Miranda Barlow Appreciation, Needles, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Series, Revenge, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 09:12:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14787656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: “Oh,” is what Miranda says when the crackling brown paper finally falls away, her exclamation quiet and stunned though she surely must have guessed what it was by shape and feel before then. Her bared hands shake with astonishment as she caresses the revealed book, reverently tracing its plain cover and cracked spine and its frayed-edged, well-thumbed pages. She laughs at the title proclaiming itselfParadise Lostin worn lettering, the impressions still stamped deeply enough to be read clearly despite being rubbed dull, the gold leaf long since gone. “Really, James?” she asks, assuming irony he did not intend, but thankfully she remains no more than mirthfully enraptured.





	Spine and Leaves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scrapbullet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrapbullet/gifts).
  * Inspired by [two masks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8499898) by [scrapbullet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrapbullet/pseuds/scrapbullet). 



> This fic was inspired forever ago by [this amazing fanvid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya4qknj6UVE) (which I have watched far too many times for my health) by [Scribdoodle,](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgOhEN48BjsyyDV9HmaPRgg) as well as by the absolutely freaking _outstanding_ work of [scrapbullet,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrapbullet/pseuds/scrapbullet) who wrote their own Miranda-pierces-Flint's-ear scene before I got around to it and whose gorgeous, evocative writing puts everything which I scraped together afterwards to shame. Thank you!

In the beginning James brings Miranda the richer, gaudier things from the _Walrus'_ prizes. He takes on an apparition's name and claws his way to a captaincy and fights his way back to the sea and carves a gory swath through the English merchant trade, slitting what veins of the accursed country's economy are within his reach with the pointedly malicious hope that perhaps, someday, he will strike some crucial artery. And from all this he wins trinkets in the form of jewelry, pretty little alabaster statues and silk scarves; whatever he can slip unseen into his pocket before he slinks back to her. Careful to keep the gifts free of blood.

She calls him foolish and negligent for taking more than his allotted share; dangerously so. Tells him to take the items back to the markets and pawn them. To have Gates surreptitiously distribute the earnings amongst his men as they should have been in the first place.

He chooses to believe it's a sign that he's not yet found something worthy of her, something valuable enough that she would deign to accept it, and continues to filch ivory combs and pluck gold necklaces from the throats of corpses, the links so fine the chain flows as though thread and snaps almost as easily.

It is on one young night when he smuggles an entire chest of ballgowns, all sea-foam lace and billowing ocean swells of aquamarine satin so smooth it snags on his callouses as if drawn by static to the sins which stain them, that her temper breaks, her voice as harsh as it was when she'd bade him not to storm Bedlam's gates like a demented general without an army.

“What am I to do with these?” she cries in anguished reproach. She stands steadfast on the lintel of her modest place of exile as if to deny him entry, but the treacherously gentle lamplight falls easily past the slim occlusion of her figure to settle on either side of her outstretched shadow and onto the shining dresses spilling out of the chest cast open chasm-wide between them, gleaming on the opulent cloth pooled in the dirt at his leaden feet. “Shall I wear them as I milk the dairy goat and collect the hens' eggs every morning? Attend Sunday service at the local parish decked out as if for a high-society gala? We are trying to fit in _here,_ we are in _this place_ now, with _these people,_ and by _God,_ James, that life of mine is _dead.”_

“I only meant for you, to... have something nice, here,” he says. “To remind you.” Of happier times, he does not say. To comfort her, is what he means. And he does mean it.

At another time he nonetheless might have met her rightful rebuke with indignation, would have matched her raised volume with defensive shouting of his own. But this quiet rural house, with its low roof and its fallow garden and the chickens murmuring sleepily over in the coop as the insects drone on and on in the verdant, rustling growth of this tropical land with its fairyland lack of definitive seasons, this sad little fucking cottage is the only thing he has been able to help give to Miranda which she has not since spurned, and he does not wish to poison her tenuous tenure in this sorry secondhand habitation with the bitter dregs of his anger. Not when all he wants tonight is to rest.

“I do not need a reminder of all I have lost,” she says, and he understands the deserved selfishness in the _I,_ in that the particular life which she misses was never truly _his_ to lose, no matter how closely the lord and lady had held him to the bosom of their privileged luxury, swaddling him in what amenities and protections they could.

Though those protections had proven so very wanting in the end.

“And I will no longer allow you to put yourself in danger of being branded a petty thief and hanged by your own crew so that you may provide me with such,” Miranda continues, after he does not make any answer. “Do I make myself _clear,_ James?”

He goes to her then, the weight of his booted steps silent in the dust and then creaking on the worn wooden planks of the porch as he approaches until he can see her, until she consolidates from a distant black silhouette trapped within her halo to a woman whose familiar form and fraught expression is made soft and faded-flat in the dimness. The world turned to indistinct portraiture, dark oils on canvas smeared and blotted into the approximate shapes.

It's a world as tired and worn as James feels after yet another fortnight of his insatiable rage eating away at him, the pillar of his tamer, more humane self, his more human self, vivisected and disemboweled and then painstakingly stitched back up whenever a still and silent moment alone allows, all hollow. But with her, he is ripped so tenderly apart again. Cracked open chin to groin. Echoing. Exposed.

When he puts his arms around her she holds herself hard and separate for an excruciating, heartbreaking instant before she folds as gracefully as a wilting flower against his chest with a little hiccup of a sob, her head tucking beneath his chin. Her hair is dry but smells of rosewater, mingling with the sea salt crusted into the seams of his coat, the blood and gunpowder beneath his nails.

She feels so very small. Her bones trembling and fragile as a songbird's. He presses a kiss against the top of her head and remains with his mouth pressed there, a supplication to her sweet crown.

“I cannot abide the thought of losing you, too,” she says.

“I'm sorry,” he whispers into her hair, and he is not only sorry for comporting himself recklessly so as to steal for her keepsakes and baubles, themselves meant as apologies which fell laughably far from the mark. Not only for depriving her of any semblance of her former lifestyle, either, for their fleeing to the anonymity of Nassau was a necessary sacrifice, mutually understood and jointly undertaken in pursuit of Thomas' stubborn dream of peace and prosperity for this wretched pirate's pit.

No, James is sorry because he knows without doubt that Miranda has seen the dedication inscribed upon the flyleaf of Marcus Aurelius' _Meditations,_ writ tall in Thomas' elegantly looping copperplate. It was one of the few things she'd saved from London which they have not yet sold off. She has the tome sitting alone on the otherwise empty bookshelf inside, a solitary gravestone.

God knows James hurts over his loss, so greatly as to howl a hurricane over it. He thinks Miranda's hurt began before his did. A papercut preceding a saber slash, its insignificant sting no less real for its pettiness.

She would not be here, and Thomas not gone, if it were not for James. All of this shattered devastation traces back to a singular fracture, a common cause. He was the page with its slicing words of exclusion. He was the sword in hand, leveraged against his loved ones' necks.

And yet for all that he is sorry he is not repentant. He will not repudiate the joy and belonging Thomas' declaration instilled him with, and he does not regret having had both Hamiltons even for so short a time, even so unequally, so selfishly, with so many things left to be said and with Miranda and himself now suffocating in the ashes of it all. Picking through the charcoal in search of some last ember alive enough to be nursed aflame.

“Come inside,” Miranda says, and he releases her from the meager safety of his arms with utmost reluctance, mollified somewhat by her hand slipping into his as she leads him within to the stifling warmth of the house, as she shuts and latches the door behind them.

She catches his glance towards the book on its shelf, and just from this he realizes that she has divined his thoughts, for she squeezes his hand tightly and looks away into the flickering hearth. The sparks of firelight reflecting within her eyes are both camouflaged and multiplied by the luminous limn of tears collecting therein.

“You were a true love of his as well,” he says. Such awkward, paltry reassurance.

A corner of her mouth quirks, a perfectly presentable mimicry of contained mirth. Everything about Miranda is always so contained, now, in a way which reaches subtly but disconcertingly beyond the preexisting manners imprinted upon her by her former station. She has purposely transformed herself into as much a prisoner of this place as James, as Flint, is a villain of it. Aspects of themselves smothered and packed away so that they may play the roles they must. Wryly and lightly and choking only slightly, she says, “Not the truest.”

He is powerless to do anything but hug her again, and then lift her feet from the unpolished tile so as to carry her down the hall and over the doorstep of her bedroom, taking not a candle along so as to leave them both in forgiving darkness.

They undress one another by knowing touch, fingers deft and patient with knots and lacing and buttons, linen and leather and cotton and whalebone stays all cast aside. Miranda's shift finally slides from her shoulders with a silken sigh, and she has him balance against her as he pulls off his boots while standing one-legged, one after the other, trousers and drawers following suit.

Last to go, an afterthought, really, is the tie holding his hair back in its shoulder-length queue. Her hair is already freed and brushes against him as she draws him down, a beguilingly soft cascade which retreats like a wave from the beach before the searching reach of his fingertips.

The bed with its feather comforter is too soft when they settle into it as naked and blind as newborns; he feels he shall sink all the way to the cool loam of his waiting grave, though the odds are much greater he'll die at sea and find burial far from the earth's moldering embrace. The deep is no comparison to a comfortable bed.

She works him with hand and with mouth but he stirs no more than if he had once again spent the evening overindulging in alcohol.

He feels as sick as if he had. Feeble and maudlin. But with a chill where the pleasant buzz of rum's heat would be despite the fire blazing in the other room, despite true winter's eternal and ungodly absence here. Ice in his stomach and not a flake of late snow outside.

“We don't have to,” Miranda says.

“It's fine,” James tells her, and rolls them to put himself atop, slides back on his hands and knees and trails his progress with kisses until his face is pressed between her thighs, her legs slung over his shoulders. He spreads her and kisses her there as well, languorously thorough, sets his lips and tongue skillfully stroking against her wet heat and keeps at it until she shudders in over-sensitized completion, twitching and tugging at his hair so as to raise his head.

With his jaw aching and his chin dripping with her essence, his immediate disquietude is finally calmed.

The musky salt of her is so curiously like and unlike the ocean's brine. Slick and clinging as he does his best to wipe it from his soaked beard with one corner of the sheets.

He listens to her breathe as her exerted panting slows into gratified drowsiness, feels the rhythm of it in her body, resonating within his own. Crawls up a bit, her legs slipping to either side, and lets his full, broad weight sink slack against her in a manner which he makes sure will not unduly crush her, laying his ear against her stomach to hear the vibrant, intrinsic secret of her precious pulse secreted therein. He slides his arm upwards before himself so that he may curl his hand flush along her side, the webbed crook between thumb and index fitting snug beneath her breast and his spread fingers angled with the limber bars of her ribs as if interlocked with the spaces between, feeling in them the rise and fall of her lungs, the close locus of her steadying heartbeat.

The sensation of her bare, sweat-sticky skin against his is obscenely holy. He thinks that he can find the strength to fight until the coming of fucking Judgment Day so long as he knows there is even a scrap of such closeness remaining to him to serve as harbor. So long as there is still a single person left alive whom he loves and trusts to even a fraction of this awesome magnitude.

The two of them are all that either of them have left. Of _him._ And neither of them ever mean to let that go, not on threat of death nor even to relieve the intolerable agony it causes them, sometimes, to hold on, claws hooking relentlessly and occasionally cruelly tight into beloved, resented flesh.

Protecting themselves from everything besides each other.

It is all they know to do.

“Now you?” she asks, into the dark, her hand beginning to comb languidly through his hair, her nails scratching lightly over his scalp. The wedding ring she still wears snags for a moment in a little blossom of pain, swiftly soothed away.

“Not tonight,” he says, tilting his head to bestow a last kiss upon her navel.

He waits until she's dropped off into slumber to leave her.

The gowns are a mite damp and dirtied but not yet lost to the dew when he bundles them back into the chest and takes them inside. The wardrobe's hinges complain when he goes to shut it after relocating the gowns from their chest to the one in which Miranda keeps her newer, homelier clothing, folded away with lavender oils and cedar to keep the moths from them, and he stops at the noise to be sure he has not disturbed her. She remains fast asleep.

The moon has by then risen far enough to shed its wan lambency through the cheap, bubble-marred glass of the window, the buttery silver of its ethereal illumination gilding the protruding edge of the ornate picture frame which hides otherwise tucked out of sight between the wardrobe and the wall. He considers pulling it out and looking at it, studying it, for his memories of Thomas have begun to fade some, only pieces— the angle of his nose in profile, the color of his eyes, the burr in his usually smooth voice when first awakened, only fragments such as these— remaining vivid to James as the brutal erasure of time wreaks its deleterious design, but the depiction itself is only as passable as a painting can be and James despises the thought of supplanting what authentic recollections his traitorous mind cares to retain with any constructions of a false nature.

The painting stays where it is. James does not return to Miranda's bed but seats himself on the floor and watches the gradual arc of the fat tallow-pale moon as it floats to its throne in the night sky, its bleak brilliance bleaching the lesser pinprick fires of the stars to invisibility. A terribly massive and unreachable thing.

 

~~~

 

When next he returns to Miranda from a long stint beneath the black, James finds her tending to the garden in pastel skirts and a sunhat, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, kneeling on a blanket so as to rip up weeds with her gloved hands and the use of a little trowel.

The shadows have stretched long over the course of the evening's passage, one cast low over her face; the wide brim of her hat creates a protective pocket of bluish shade held coolly apart from the deepening amber of the oncoming sunset like some impenetrable privacy of mind made visually manifest.

She straightens to watch him as he dismounts and leads his horse through the gate, and as her head tips up the shadow recedes to a narrower stripe slashed across her eyes and brow, the rest of her exposed skin washed with a golden sheen, her high cheeks and the smooth, darling curl of her chin charmingly framed by the broad, gauzy ribbon tied in a neat bow beneath, loose fabric and the artfully teased tendrils of hair in front of her ears fluttering in the lazy breeze. A modern Demeter, smiling at him in welcome.

“Is this to be that flower garden you always wanted?” James asks. The desultory thudding of the horse's hooves striking the path are cushioned in the tangled and overgrown grass as the beast follows him.

“Necessity sadly dictates that this plot is fated for vegetables,” Miranda says, her cheer contrary to her supposed disappointment.

“A pity,” says he. Trying on a sympathetic face.

“Yet vegetable plants do bear flowers before their fruits nonetheless,” she says, and he shrugs, sanguinely conceding to the platitude.

It has rained recently, one of those sudden spring squalls. The air is redolent with wet greenery, alive with the scents of feral mint and blossoming wildflowers and freshly tilled earth, everything scrubbed to sparkling so that even his lungs feel cleansed with it. The sea seems, for once, to be very far away.

He unsaddles his horse right there in the drive, dropping its tack and saddlebags and blanket to the ground beside him. The horse itself, sleek and dark and exceptionally docile for such a fine hotblooded breed, stands obediently enough until he's finally divested its sculpted head of the bridle and bit, at which point it immediately ducks away from his hands, drops its arching neck, and singlemindedly sets about grazing, lips and teeth eagerly tearing up a sizable chunk of tough grass with great alacrity and its beautifully muscled hindquarters then swinging towards him with a disinterested flick of its flowing tail as it overly-promptly moseys the fuck off with a few flashing strides of its tremendously long, graceful legs.

Ungrateful, cannily patient pig of a creature.

He'll properly see to its grooming and stabling in a moment. After he tries making amends.

“I've something for you, if you'll accept it,” James says to Miranda, retrieving a rectangular package of brown paper from the satchel at his hip.

Miranda twists quickly back around, some unfortunate weeds flopping about in her hand as if strangled, the clump of roots and earth at the end of their stalks swinging wildly and showering dirt as the earlier clouds did rain. She does not appear best pleased.

She has, in fact, taken an abrupt turn for confounded exasperation, if James is any judge; her brow furrows and her lips have parted and curved in incredulity, the poised carriage of her head drawn back.

James approaches with appropriate caution and holds the parcel out to her, resisting the urge to shuffle in place like a naughty schoolboy as he proffers it, his boots pressing deep prints into the rich black soil. “I took it openly this time. As part of my share.”

He's not sure why he bothered wrapping the thing. Sentimentality, perhaps. To make it seem a more obvious and genuine gift than all the other awful, shortsighted, ill-thought-out ones.

She takes a moment to eye it with acute suspicion. “It is not anything enameled or encrusted with precious stones?”

“Nothing of the sort,” he assures her.

At this she sighs deeply, places the weeds into her basket, and removes her gloves, the buff leather scuffed and supple, fitted closely enough that she fastidiously plucks the tip of each finger loose before sliding the whole from her hand and repeating the same with the opposite so she may drop them as a pair onto her lap. James' entire arm feels inordinately light when she relieves him of the parcel, and he drifts into parade rest on automatic to keep from fidgeting as he waits for her to finish fiddling with the knots of the string, gripping his own wrist behind his back.

“Oh,” is what Miranda says when the crackling brown paper finally falls away, her exclamation quiet and stunned though she surely must have guessed what it was by shape and feel before then. Her bared hands shake with astonishment as she caresses the revealed book, reverently tracing its plain cover and cracked spine and its frayed-edged, well-thumbed pages. She laughs at the title proclaiming itself _Paradise Lost_ in worn lettering, the impressions still stamped deeply enough to be read clearly despite being rubbed dull, the gold leaf long since gone. “Really, James?” she asks, assuming irony he did not intend, but thankfully she remains no more than mirthfully enraptured.

He takes a moment before replying. Partly because a surge of relief passes over him and he must gather himself from bobbing lightheadedly in its wake. Partly because he forlornly wants to fix the sound of her saying his given name in his mind, engrave it upon his soul as an impalpable totem. He is not James anywhere, anymore, except with her.

With her, where he is at his most vulnerable, and feels it most keenly. The gutted cavern of him only then crying out its mortality. With her, in being seen by her, he is not only accepted, but. Refilled. Miraculously rejuvenated as if by the sweet waters of that mythical fountain of youth.

It is not a healing. It fades again all too quickly, and sometimes the aquifer runs sour, poisoned by a taint of rot in the mud.

James is already a dead man, after all.

Yet even with their center deceased, their cherished cornerstone dashed and crumbled, that which is still shared between them is another thing he cannot possibly repudiate, cannot even consider casting aside simply for it being a thing which falls short of perfect purity. He is dependent. Addicted. And without it to sustain him, without _her,_ he would truly be a being departed, a revenant. He would be merely, wholly, Flint.

Such a horror does not bear contemplation.

Miranda survived him. She is alive. And by fucking God, she shall stay so. They have a future to build here and their work is barely begun.

With this weighing heavily in his mind, he recites the lines which had earlier caught his eye as he was flipping through Milton's pages: “'Our state cannot be severed; we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.'”

She laughs again. “So I am Eve and you're Adam, then? Perhaps I shall plant a properly forbidden apple tree here as well, if your returning to me really means the reaping of its harvest.”

That he would have unwittingly prompted Miranda's comparison of herself to a biblical figure most often cast as one of temptation and corruption, even in jest, instantly strikes a sharp guilt deep into him, a wretched sense of hypocrisy. He is careful to keep it from his demeanor lest he elicit a pointed lecture on the virtues of humor and the evils of shame.

“Adam is the one who forsakes his innocence so as to follow his love into banishment,” is what he says, subtly attempting to shift the blame, to distract and replace her self-deprecation with his. “I rather doubt that of the two of us, _I_ am the one who best fits that description.”

“Innocence! As if I would wait my turn to take a bite from knowledge.” Another easy joke, at her own expense. Flippant as a fencing match conducted with blades of grass.

 _“You_ did not condemn us from the Garden,” he finds himself growling vehemently in sudden and uncalled-for overreaction, demeanor be damned.

Miranda's posture almost imperceptibly stiffens but she makes sure to take her time before looking up at him, rearranging her skirts over her lap and relocating the gloves from lap to basket. She brings the book up to press it above her breast with one hand as if to make of it a shield for her heart, pulp and leather and string and cork, cut and seasoned and stacked so neatly, its binding battered with a history neither of them know. When she does meet his gaze her expression is blithe and calm, the orange light glowing richly in the dark brown of her lovely eyes and picking out elusive reddish glints of burnt umber in their sagacious depths, and James' breathing has gone thick and unsteady, catching in his throat as if he's been shedding tears, though they are both of them dry-eyed.

James blinks first, a soft rush of darkness gliding blessedly wet over the parched spheres of his exhaustion-sore eyes. A brief blindness wherein his balance sways and sound recedes momentarily before everything flows back in as inexorably and mercilessly as the tide to leave him beached within his own carcass, with all its innumerable aches and scrapes and bruises. Upon opening his eyes again he is met by Miranda holding a hand out to him, palm-down, the other still pinning the book to her bosom.

His nails have dug into the inside of his wrist and they peel reluctantly away from his flesh as he takes his arms from behind his back so as to accept her overture and help her to her feet, his military posture having already since sagged. Her hand folds tightly over his, a precise fit, small and warm and not nearly so soft as it once was. With the many menial manual chores now required of her in her present circumstances her skin has been growing new callouses to match his own lifelong ones, the tender blisters finally giving way to semi-opaque patches of malleable horn. A quiet piecemeal imitation.

She _tsks_ in disapproval at the livid little crescent marks he's left on himself once she has risen and has seen. She slides her grip up from his hand to clasp his wrist, and then strokes her thumb firmly over the indentations, kneading into his pulse, pushing against the tendons much as the hammers of her harpsichord drive down upon its strings when she plays. Orchestrating the discordant mess of his thunderous emotions into a coherent melody.

His breath wavers again, loud and rough in his own ears. A syncopated rhythm.

“'The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n,'” Miranda quotes, pulling him closer. She barely needs draw his wrist towards herself for him to be led, his toes plowing shallowly into the soil as he shuffles compliantly nearer. A waft of sun-baked wicker and sweat and that same clean whiff of rosewater pervades the shrinking space of fresh air between them, her skirts blowing against his lower legs as if to soothe away the twinges in his knees. “I've always appreciated that bit. The assertion of mental self-determinism reminds me of your Stoics. When taken out of context, anyways. Did you happen to acquire the rest of the volumes?”

“Have them in the saddlebags,” James murmurs. He lets his eyes slide shut again, and has her touch be his only anchor, the only guidance out of the void into which he falls. “They're in as poor a condition as that one there, but at least their former owner had the decency not to break apart a set.” He then adds, peevishly, “If not the decency not to knock them the fuck about. Abominable, to afford books so little respect. And _poetry_ books at that.”

“Well, it is arguably _blasphemous_ poetry,” she allows musingly, and pauses in consideration, her fingers tapping against the cover of one of the damaged books in question. “Or perhaps they've simply been exceedingly well-loved.”

“Unto death,” James scoffs.

Another pause. Longer. The palm fronds looming benignly over their heads rustle in the wind, the cool of dusk lapping up against the blank sand of his shore. Through the pad of her thumb he imagines he feels their heartbeats merging.

“I didn't mean to upset you,” Miranda tells him.

“It doesn't matter,” he says, and she squeezes him to the point of hurt, her nails littering another stinging constellation of cuts over his own. He cannot tell if it is in affirmation or rebuke, but this, too, is of little consequence in the long run.

“What else is in those bags?” she asks at length. Mercifully committing the vague contention attempting to interpose itself between them to the oblivion of denial.

“A fancy bottle of very nice port wine,” says James.

 

~~~

 

They imbibe enough to slough off the last of the sour mood. Miranda has long since unpacked the crystal and china from their crates of straw, and they christen the glass goblets with the rich red vintage stolen from a merchant captain's private stores, sparkling scarlet as sunlit blood and overly sweet and fruity for his taste.

His tongue has become accustomed to swilling the potent acid of cheap grog. Most of the first months at Nassau had passed him by in a drunken haze of rage, his hangover driving him up with the dawn and grief fueling his ambitious daytime activities until he made it to the night, when he was free to drown it all over again with further overgenerous applications of rotgut rum. He'd stayed far away from Miranda, then. Allowed her to settle in, fix up the house, hire servants. All on her own. Abandoned her so she would not see what a state he'd been in.

Abandoned her because he was afraid of her. Afraid of exacerbating her pain with his.

Thomas had made her promise that they would take care of each other, but Thomas had not known how enormously their worst impulses were amplified in each others' presence. How integral Thomas had become to keeping them balanced.

James and Miranda had spent time enough together as Mr. and Mrs. in a shared cabin on their exodus across the ocean to know that they were never meant to coexist as such. They are too similarly opposite. Well-matched in all the wrong places.

Perhaps there is still a happy ending to be scrounged between them here. James must hold out hope. Hold fast to his purpose. If only he can do so, there is no doubt that it shall be achieved.

“The last bit,” Miranda says, waving the bottle, the dregs sloshing thinly about the bottom.

“Shall I finish it for you, then?” he asks, and she smiles at him over the candles and glittering crystal and the crumbs of their modest meal of cold cuts and bread and cheese, and instead of passing it to him she stands and comes around the corner of the dining table to where he has pushed himself away from it, her dress rustling, her hand steadying herself against the back of his chair, then cupping the back of his head.

He raises an eyebrow at her, feeling finally loose and comfortable enough to make the challenge, and from the spark in her eyes he sees she accepts.

“Here,” she says in warning, and tips the bottle to pour the wine between his lips, the rim clicking clumsily against his teeth, the weight of it swinging up and bearing down upon his mouth and pressing him back into the firm brace of her hand. He almost chokes at the short and sudden wash of liquid, traces of grit scraping against his palate after he swallows and a rivulet escaping to trickle down his chin. Before she can draw the empty bottle away he makes a brief show of sliding his tongue about the bottle's sleek round mouth and chases it with his lips as if to swallow the neck of it as well.

She snorts in a sudden burst of inelegant laughter as she pulls it away and clunks it onto the table, thick, hollow glass striking wood. “You went nearly cross-eyed,” she chuckles, settling sideways onto his lap, putting her arms about his shoulders, and kissing him silly before he can respond, the hot, slick mass of her clever tongue delving into the outraged gape of his mouth as if to seek out the last of the wine's lingering sweetness and excavate the grit from his molars, very effectively shutting him up.

Silent peals of mirth still shake her, and through their joined mouths her amusement is transmitted seamlessly to him, the sympathetic joy melding with the warm buzz of alcohol and lust all roiling as one in his stomach. When they part she adds, “Your eyes are the same color as the bottle in this light. Like dark emeralds.” Her breath puffs against his wet lips, and she drops another, lighter kiss upon him like the sultry press of a seal to hot wax. A stamp of ownership.

The imprint she leaves is indelible.

He sways towards her and is checked by her hands, one gripping the queue of his hair and tugging, her other sliding up against his jaw, tilting him to her even as she keeps him from her. Her weight shifts enticingly over his clothed groin. Heavy pressure with not enough friction. “Need I tie you down, or will you behave for me?”

 _“Miranda,”_ he urges, just short of gasping complaint. Breathless and wanting and not much caring how she has him so long as she _will._

She clicks her tongue and with her thumb taps his chin in time with the sound, a chiding one-two tattoo. As she does so she rocks upon her sidesaddle perch. Slow and teasing, the skirts sliding lightly over the tough, restrictive canvas of his breeches. “If you can't even use your words I don't suppose I can trust you to exert any self-control. At least make the effort to ask me for the ropes.”

After a moment to compose himself James dryly replies, “If you would be so kind?”

Another tap, this time the pad of her index finger upon the tip of his nose. A silent, playful command for him to remain where he is. There is a wicked fondness tucked into the crease at the side of her mouth when she gives it to him. It deepens with her smile, her eyes appearing black and shining as she rises so as to fetch the bonds.

Outside the frogs are singing. The sliver of the front window visible through a narrow gap in the curtains is an opaque, Stygian shard of mirror, and James' reflection looks empty, somehow, despite the dumb flush of inebriation and arousal. A chiaroscuro simulacrum of heavy-lidded life.

Miranda appears even more otherworldly as she returns behind him, tall enough so as to be a headless apparition with the unmade coils of a hangman's noose in her pale hands.

She meets his gaze in the window, fleeting and perfunctory and understanding. She closes the curtains before going to him.

What would some unseen spy lurking beyond that sheet of jet have thought, to see the fearsome Captain Flint sitting docile and trusting as a lamb while a nice Puritan woman ties him to a chair? It's almost a humorous diversion to imagine their confusion, their disbelief.

Or it would be had he not heard some of the salacious rumors of Mrs. Barlow which are already being spread by her righteously pious neighbors, and which have already circulated to his own curious crew, following the tenuous but discernible connection between himself and Miranda like hunting hounds on fox spoor. He'd punched out one of his own men for repeating a bit of slander within his earshot, but odds are they'll continue to paint her as some increasingly demonic harlot even if Flint himself no longer catches anything whispered in his vicinity by fools within reach of his fists.

“You're going to work yourself into a state,” Miranda observes. She kneels beside him and makes quick work of tying his left leg to that of the chair's. The rope warps the fit of his boots, pressing his ankle firmly against the wood, the corner pushing up straight and hard alongside the trench made of his anklebone and Achilles tendon.

“So _soothe_ me,” he grumbles. This earns him another sharp yank on his ponytail as she passes around him to do the other side. Standing and kneeling again though there is room enough between his legs and the table for her to have simply shuffled over.

Even in this she moves according to some arcane choreography of grace from which she will not deviate. The nape of her neck shines slim and bare and white beneath her dark hair as she bows it beside the outside of his right knee, the topmost notches of her spine standing out in sharp relief above the ruffled trim of her dress.

James has already placed his wrists limply alongside each other behind the chair back when she has come around to address them. She gathers hold of him anyways, the rope tucked in between the crook of her elbow and her side so that she can take both his wrists into her hands, again finding the precise spot wherein his pulse resides and pressing unerringly in. Her thumb does not meet her own fingertips around him, and she squeezes fit to crush bone as if that would make up for it, as if that would close the gap and cement her grasp. As if she is afraid he will slip away from her otherwise.

He relaxes into it and succumbs.

 

~~~

 

The next morning when they are both sober enough to allow the risk of a razor she pushes him into a chair again and shaves the sides of his overgrown beard, the stropped edge gliding in slow, crackling strokes over the lathered soap, scraping swathes of smooth, clean, pinked skin in its wake. She shapes what is left so that it is longer on his chin, and, as a finishing touch, she then waxes and tweaks the corners of his mustache into little twirled points.

 _“There._ Now you look a proper villain,” she announces.

“Oh?” he says, cocking his head first to one side and then to the other, allowing her full and varied view of her own handiwork. “You did not think me piratical enough for merely _practicing_ high seas piracy? You believe that I must bow to aesthetic concerns to be taken seriously, is that it?”

“It's certainly a serious improvement,” says Miranda, approvingly indeed. “Now, if you would only shade your eyes with some kohl...”

“I'll not stoop to being painted and made up like a two-bit player upon a third-rate theater stage.”

Miranda sighs and shakes her head in surrender, a twinkle still lurking in her eye which speaks of the matter simply being put away for the time being, and for the time being only.

When James makes to stand she stops him with a hand to his chest.

“What?” he asks. “Do you wish to tie me up and have your wicked way with me again so soon?”

She laughs, clearly seeing the flicker of enthusiasm which he can't help but harbor at the prospect, but says, “No. I rather had something else in mind. Yet more to do with your appearance.”

“Is that all,” says James, settling back and allowing some hint of his disappointment to show in the sullen cross of his arms and the flatness of his affect.

“I actually rather think you'll like it,” she says, fetching a small jewelry box from her vanity.

There is an earring inside. A plain gold stud, not too large.

“Where's its mate?”

“You only need the one,” says Miranda. “One is rakish.”

“And two is trying too hard?” he mocks, glancing meaningfully at the decorations which dangle from both of her ears and earning himself a swat to the back of his head as he snickers at his own attempt at wit. “All right, all right. Just put it in me already.”

“That sounds familiar,” Miranda remarks with vengefully snide insinuation as she trades the jewelry box for her embroidery kit and extracts a needle.

It's a joke. And Miranda herself has been inside of him, with fingers and with toys, and that is all she is joking about. He does not let himself think past that. Does not let himself shrink into the empty place that pains him.

Miranda lights a candle and sterilizes the needle, the metal going black as it passes through the blue-edged tongue of orange flame which twists and gutters, bright and restless and eerily separate from all other surrounding elements, above the burning wick. She does not flinch at the heat even when the flame licks hopefully towards her fingertips. Only watches it do so, calm and careful, and then apparently judges the needle cleansed.

James squints in leeriness as she palms the stud in one hand and approaches him with the needle poised with delicate intent in the other. They are very steady, her hands. As steady as Miranda is in all things.

She tips his chin up, the first knuckle of her index finger chucking the stupid, freshly trimmed point of his goatee, and she pecks a kiss to his mouth, and she says, “You don't have to go through with this flight of fancy. Simply change your mind, if you want to, and tell me.”

He has already acquired that tiny crescent moon tattoo up on his right arm, the lampblack poked into his flesh by Gates as a sort of induction ritual after he'd admitted that he hadn't yet any notable marks or scars to distinguish himself. He doesn't see how this is any more extreme. Or why he wouldn't leap at the chance for Miranda to mark James as hers in this way.

Have her mark him as Flint.

“I want you to,” he says.

She smiles, the playfulness returning, and gently pinches his earlobe, setting the point of the needle to its center. “What do we say?”

“Please,” he gripes, rolling his eyes. “We say pl— _fuck.”_

“We say please and fuck?” she asks, smirking now. The slender metal rod has pierced clean through his earlobe with a faint pop as it breached that last barrier of supple skin on the opposite side, and James can feel his flesh pulsing angrily around the unyieldingly stiff and foreign intrusion, the needle's tip now scratching ever so faintly against his neck, over where the artery runs. He is acutely aware of Miranda's hand holding the needle. Controlling every miniscule movement and tug of it.

“We say please and fuck you,” James retorts childishly.

Miranda slides the needle from his lobe and replaces it with the gold of the stud, a drop of blood escaping to tickle him before she thumbs it away. “Not so bad, was it?”

He snorts at her. She tweaks his beard again, and presses a second kiss to his lips. And then a third, a longer, more lingering one, to his forehead. A kiss that a mother would give to a child, placed where he can no longer meet her eyes. Where they can both pretend that he didn't notice the sudden surge of grief betrayed therein.

The mourning catches them at odd times, now. Stalks them as a matter of course. Rears up when they're at their happiest. They are learning not to begrudge it.

 

~~~

 

Miranda receives some letters, sometimes, from those who know of her former life, routed through a circuit of suitably discreet and incurious persons.

They have become rare of late. Peter Ashe stopped writing completely after informing them of Thomas' death at Bethlem and including his most heartfelt condolences. Perhaps he broke contact out of misplaced guilt. Something like an overabundance of tact, a loss for words.

He is not the only one to have done so. James understands that very few of Miranda's former acquaintances wish to have anything to do with a disowned and widowed adulteress whose unfaithfulness ostensibly drove her own husband first to madness and then to death. It is actually former members of the Hamiltons' staff with whom Miranda maintains anything approaching regular correspondence. People who were too loyal to believe the slander, or who suspected something of the truth and were sympathetic nonetheless, for the Lord and Lady Hamilton were widely known as benevolent employers and fostered great love amongst those who worked for them.

And of course their former servants would have no way of knowing Miranda's current complicity in crime. They wouldn't know of Flint. And they wouldn't know of the depth and breadth of ill will which they bear for the Earl. The lethality of their intent.

Miranda receives such a letter, _the_ letter, from one of these former servants, on an inauspicious day much like any other, and she presents it to him when he returns from another of what they have taken to euphemistically referring to as his “ventures,” sliding it mutely across the table where she was sitting in wait.

Once he's finished reading the letter James sets it back down on the table. The pages of paper almost float to rest in front of Miranda's clasped hands, so light for the weight of the information enclosed therein, and the sunlight glows a tarnished gold through the parchment. Miranda is very calm and composed. Very still.

“Why did you show me this?” he asks.

She looks up at him, her eyes resolutely blank and level. “You know why,” she says, without inflection. She smooths down the corner of the letter, smudging the dusty fingerprints he's left, and then folds it up again, neatly aligning the edges and running her thumbnail along the creases to flatten them. “Are you going to find the _Maria Aleyne?”_

“Yes.”

“Will you kill him, when you find him?”

“Yes,” he says. A vow, an oath, sworn.

Miranda nods, once. Taps the folded letter against the tabletop and meets his eyes again. “Good.”

 

~~~

 

She cuts his hair before he goes. Trims it so that it is relieved of its bulk and ends in a wave about his ears, the unfamiliar, wild looseness of it occasionally obscuring the glint of the piercing. Long, sinuous auburn strands drift down to his shoulders as she snips at it with scissors borrowed from her embroidery kit just as that needle had been those few weeks ago. In short order James' respectable queue is sawed free from the back of his head and droops limp as a dead snake in Miranda's hand. She tosses it whole, ribbon and all, into the fire, the odor of burning hair overwhelming that of the wood smoke.

Were she the witch that others claim her to be she would say some incantation. Some deadly devilry in a guttural language no one knows. But she is a mortal woman, sending a mortal man to do her bidding in her stead, and she is scared for him, and jealous of him, and angry for and at herself, and she is grieving, as he is.

So she only moves to stand behind him, and curves her hand over the nakedness of his newly bared nape, and they look upon the fire together. They wait as the hair smokes and curls, embers crawling along the dull copper of the tresses and leaving delicate lines and bridges of crumbling ash in their wake. The fire blazes up, popping as it finds a reservoir of sap in one of the logs, and then even the ash is swallowed into the brilliancy of the conflagration.

He remembers the candle flame. The hearth fire reflected in Miranda's eyes. His noble navy man's hair searing away to sooty nothing.

He holds it all to himself, lets it alight in his chest like a multitude of magnificent wings, unfurling. Fills the charred hollow of himself with this burning, scorching rage, devotes himself to the revelation which is this raging pyre, this inferno, this pillar so great that not all the seawater in every ocean the world over could ever douse it, and neither of them say a single word.

 

~~~

 

The Earl is not so self-righteous now, not so supercilious and superior when on his knees, blubbering for mercy. His latest young paramour screams and screams but Flint does not hear her. He has ears only for Alfred Hamilton's sound of pain; a high, surprised gasp as the first cut catches him across the chest, slicing through layers of fine cloth and fat accrued through a spoiled lifetime of only the richest foods, severing the sagging wastage of barren, shriveled pectoral muscle all the way in to the ribs beneath. The way he stares in dumb shock at the blood from his own wound, smeared over his aged hands with their fastidiously trimmed and polished nails. Mouth agape and his slimy, venomous tongue bulging up between his wooden dentures, his warty jowls quivering and a twitch starting below one piggish little eye, as he watches the end of his truncated cravat flutter to the splattered planks where it soaks up a scarlet blotch in the shape of a broken heart.

“How dare you,” Alfred splutters, almost as if he has forgotten his own fear in the face of this outrage, but he shrieks and cowers again quickly enough when Flint lays another cut across him, his arms jerking up to shield himself and the sword slicing through the trailing lace of his cuffs and the velvet of his sleeves to scrape against bone. The tears run slick as acid down his disgusting face. His slashed chest heaves. “If you have any modicum, any _scrap_ of decency within you, sir, you will _spare me,”_ he cries. “I can pay you. I can pay you in riches beyond your imaginings. I have wealth, and power, and influence—”

“Even if you _had_ a _soul_ of your own to offer me I would not take it,” Flint snarls. It is the first thing he has said, and he wants to say more.

He wants to damn this man with expletives, wants to roar recriminations and vile invective, wants this wretched toad to _understand_ and to _rue_ what he has done, understand the fragile, miraculous beauty of what he has taken away, what he has so selfishly and cruelly and _carelessly_ crushed underfoot and ground into the mud. He wants to shove his pain and hatred down his fucking _throat_ and make him _choke_ on it. He wants to impress the utter magnitude of his _loathing_ upon him, into the rotten _core_ of him, but even Flint's passionate and practiced oratory skills cannot arrange this most livid desire into some semblance of articulation, into some simple, puny speech.

Everything he has to say is trapped in that silence he shared with Miranda before the fire. It was never meant for human comprehension. It is an inhuman thing, a festering curse, a torment, and it lives within him now, deep where there is no voice, and all it can do is spur him to action.

All he can do is lift his sword.

“Surely not even _Thomas_ would _love_ you if he knew,” the Earl screams, lashing out with the vicious, unwise desperation of a dying thing. “Love” only comes from his mouth laden with sarcasm, spat with contempt, and Flint expects that this may be the only time that the Earl has ever spoken the word aloud, and that even had he uttered it before, that he would have done so with no less vitriol, with no more kindness.

Flint angles his restless, beastly pacing to take him around to the Earl's other side and then slices his legs out behind his knees, making the Earl collapse back onto his laurels, gibbering and scrambling and reaching his hands out and up in supplication and doing everything short of tearing the wig from his head.

“You do not say his name,” Flint growls, rounding before the Earl again.

“Lieutenant,” the Earl gasps. “Please. Spare me, and my fortune's yours. I will give you anything you want. _Anything_ you want. I'll give you—”

Another cut to shut him up, this time to his shoulder, but the Earl rallies and babbles on. “How could you do this to me?” he asks in plaintive bewilderment, apparently in all honesty. His mouth works. “How—?” he says again, tears still running down his cheeks and blood seeping from his injuries, and fails to come up with anything more meaningful to ask.

Another. Under the elbow, deep into his side; reaching the guts, viscera peeking out. The stench of bile and bowels.

He scrabbles to keep his entrails from spilling. He's gasping, a strained whine scraping in his labored breath, and he's staring in forlorn hopelessness at the floor. No longer seeking something in Flint which is not there to find.

The Earl has already killed it himself, after all, along with his own son.

And so Flint kills him. He severs his throat with a rush of blood and then plunges the saber into his chest, straight into Alfred Hamilton's despicable, desiccated shrew's corpse of a heart, and he twists the blade until the Earl twitches his last.

He puts the young woman out of her misery far more quickly. One blow and her screams have stopped and there is only the tranquil creaking and groaning of the ship's hull about him, the distant furor of his men as they go about ransacking her, oblivious to the slaughter perpetrated only a deck below and a distinct note of discontent at the the meagerness of the haul already entering the tone of their voices.

Flint pulls a kerchief from his belt and wipes the gore from his sword as he leaves.

 

~~~

 

“They're dead,” he tells her.

Miranda was waiting for him not at home but at Nassau itself, at the beach. She has been standing there for long enough that the wind has mussed her coiffure and whipped a faint blush into her cheeks, and she does not have a lantern. She has been standing there in the shadows, in the dark, for God knows how long. Perhaps as soon as she'd heard tell of approaching sails.

He is folded into her arms when he meets her, and they stay there, sand beneath them and clouds covering the stars above and the waves crashing in rolling susurrus over the shore not so very far away, dry-eyed and unrepentant. Together.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Rebloggable post [here!](http://willowbilly.tumblr.com/post/174364350556/spine-and-leaves-willowbilly-black-sails)


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